Feeling blue: melancholic dispositions and conscious unhappiness

Chapter 2 begins by looking at how medical and cultural histories of melancholy and unhappiness have traditionally defined and diagnosed such feelings as negative, unhealthy, and undesirable, even while recognizing their potentially enabling features. Freud’s essay of 1917 is seen to mark a definitive moment when melancholia becomes fully pathologized. In response to this, the chapter turns to the work of Walter Benjamin, who attempts to mine new readings of melancholic experience (and criticism) that show the latter to be profoundly social, political, and productive. This places his work at odds with the prevailing consensus, which characterizes melancholia as a personal psychological failing that is stifling, passive, and anti-social. The chapter closes with a section on ‘conscious unhappiness’. Revisiting Theodor Adorno’s work, this section affirms the importance and interconnectedness of affective and political refusal. Rather than seeking to avoid or relieve dysphoric feelings through psychic adjustment, conscious unhappiness amplifies unmet needs, giving voice to the suffering that arises from a social world in need of wholesale transformation. As part of its revolutionary critique of capitalist social relations, critical theory refuses to privatize the notion of happiness and in so doing aligns itself with the (negative) truth-content of unhappiness – the bad that cannot be made good.

Coda

In lieu of a summary restatement of the preceding chapters, it seems more appropriate to finish by considering the role of affective politics in our contemporary moment. Much has already been written about 2016 marking a uniquely turbulent year of political upheaval, expressive of widespread discontent with the ‘establishment’, elites, and experts. What might a critical theory of affect have to say in response to the ostensibly seismic political events encompassed in Brexit, Donald Trump, and our supposedly new ‘post-truth’ age? Let us take the last feature as a starting point, because in unpacking the covert presuppositions of the very notion of a ‘post-truth’ politics, one can begin to better understand not only why the votes for Brexit and Trump actually came to pass, but also why they were unforeseen by so many commentators and pollsters....

A feeling for things: objects, affects, mimesis

Chapter 3 looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory’s engagement with the world of objects. The chapter begins by outlining the recent upsurge in theoretical writing on objects/things, especially within the much-hyped field of ‘object-oriented ontology’ or ‘speculative realism’. After drawing attention to the major social and political deficiencies of these contemporary approaches to objects, the chapter offers an account of early critical theory that draws out a more philosophically viable and socio-politically engaged orientation toward the object world. To make the case, the author recovers elements of Siegfried Kracauer’s materialist film theory, before exploring two complementary concepts from Adorno’s work, namely, the preponderance of the object, and mimesis. Offering a staunch critique of Habermas’s rejection of mimesis, the chapter considers critical theory’s emphasis on a political and affective aesthetics as playing a crucial part in how one conceptualizes and experiences objects. As a result, a key distinction is drawn between today’s avowedly post-critical, non-humanist ontologists on one side, and the critical proto-humanism that motivates the early Frankfurt School on the other.

Thinking through feeling: critical theory and the affective turn

Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.

Introduction: once more, with feeling

The introduction sets out the book’s aims and objectives in relation to the predominant legacies of political philosophy. The author shows how rationalist principles have formed the backbone of Western philosophical thought, invariably in opposition to affect, emotion, feeling, and passion, since the latter are seen to be detrimental to or obstructive of the procedural functionality of reason. In contrast to this, taking Dialectic of Enlightenment as a starting point, it is suggested that early critical theory provides an important corrective to the excesses of formalized, rationalist, and anti-emotional modes of argumentation. The point is that reason in and of itself is not sufficient as a foundation for political theory.

Expectant emotion and the politics of hope

Chapter 4 explores the affective politics of hope. It begins by surveying the ways in which historical events and their narrativization have (re)produced certain ideological positions and affective dispositions. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the ‘end of history’, are seen to have created a sense of fearlessness, righteousness, and unfettered optimism. At the same time, much of the left have internalized the position of honourable defeat, licking its political wounds, and bemoaning the insurmountable nature of capital as vehemently as any of the latter’s most faithful handmaidens. The end of history is also said to signal the end of utopia, as all speculation as to possible alternatives to capitalism is condemned as unrealistic, idealistic, and unreasonable. The author notes how political realism has become the dominant paradigm, banishing utopian impulses and diminishing political hopes to the most myopic of visions. After plotting the familiar narrative of decline, and showing how an affective structure (and affecting narrative) can constrain a certain brand of politics while enabling others to flourish, the remainder of the chapter analyses the critical potential of hope as a political affect, especially as expressed in the work of Baruch Spinoza and Ernst Bloch.